The Other Wind

Reviews

The Guardian

“...So I was surprised to learn that, 12 years ago, Le Guin
extended the trilogy to a tetralogy: slightly overlapping with
events in The Farthest Shore,Tehanu concentrated on the
ex-high priestess of Atuan, now living among the goats of
Sparrowhawk's native island, Gont. It maintained the
consistency of the series but otherwise turned the premises of
fantasy literature upside-down....

“Gradually, in a masterpiece of chilling narration, the whole
living world becomes unable to sleep. And to fix that, the
world has to become like our own, to become like our un-magical selves: to grow up.

“But there is more to The Other Wind than that: Le Guin's
consistency now becomes revealed as a kind of destiny, a drive
towards democracy if you like, an implicit impatience with the
highfalutin genealogies such bogus mythologies are compelled
to recite. Marvellously, the book contains humour, which is
otherwise a kind of universal acid to children's fable: if it is funny,
it corrodes everything it touches. Here it actually works. And the
real magic now is the magic of writing. Early on, someone tries
a spell on some goats to see if he has any magic power: 'Noth
hierth malk man,' and so on. It doesn't work: 'The goats looked
at him with alert disdain and moved away a little.' 'Alert
disdain'! Has anyone ever come up with two better words to
describe the way goats look at you? That — well, that's just
uncanny.”

The Nation

“All the patterns, clues, and oppositions set up over thirty years in five other books, come to fruition and are worked out in The Other Wind. . . As far as gender goes, these books seem to me a true symbolic picture of where we are now, with no untainted source of male power, no mature authoritative leadership of any kind, caught midway in our evolution as social beings...”

— Meredith Tax
January 28 2002

The Economist

“All of Ursula Le Guin's strengths are abundantly present . . .: narrative power, tautly controlled and responsive prose, an imagination that never loses touch with the reality of things as they are...”